It’s October, the month in which Red Dwarf XII hits Dave, after having hit UKTV Play a week earlier. You can count the number of days to go on one hand, which means it’s about time we prepared ourselves as much as possible to receive, process and dissect six brand new episodes. Last year, Series XI hit us like no other series had before, and lessons have been learned this time around, so we’re making a few little changes to our plans. We’ve also taken the opportunity to make some small but significant changes to the site’s structure, so allow us to talk you through it all.

As you may have already noticed, the categories have changed. And yes, there was much discussion about how to reflect this in the colour scheme in a way that was least irritating. This is something we’ve been meaning to do for a while; basically the definitions before were too narrow, so you ended up with a bunch of pieces that weren’t really one thing or another, and they often found themselves in the ill-defined “Misc” category. We thank Misc for its years of long service, but it’s time for it to retire, as the new line-up of categories is unveiled:

Quickies – a new category, for content that’s not quite in-depth enough to be described as a “feature”, but not necessarily topical enough to be a news piece. Quickies is basically like a dome containing observations.

This, I’m sure you’ll agree, is absolutely fascinating. In other site admin news, the Spoiler Policy has been updated to cover the impending broadcast period. All the existing rules apply until each episode hits UKTV Play, at which point it’ll be once again time for people watching online to stick to one set of threads, and those waiting for Dave to stick to another. From Thursday, each new piece of content will come with a spoiler banner, indicating whether it contains discussion for UKTV Play viewers or Dave viewers. An extra navigation bar will also be added, for you to keep track of our content.

But what content will that be, we hear you cry? Well, it’s similar to last year, but with one key difference that will hopefully lead a less stressful time for us and, more importantly, a better end-product for you. Here’s the plan:

Let’s Talk About X (on UKTV Play): Discussion threads. The first of these will be posted on Thursday morning, as we don’t know what time the episode will appear. The timing for subsequent weeks may have to be determined when we have a better picture, but they’ll always be live as soon as the episode is available, and usually before.

Live Instant Reaction DwarfCasts: This is the big news. We’re changing our DwarfCasts to UKTV Play pace. They will always take place at the regular time of 9pm on Friday nights. This was the trickiest thing to get right last time, and we never quite managed it. The problem with doing it at Dave pace is that they no longer felt like *instant* reactions – we were just going over the same discussions we’d been having all week. We tried to create a more formatted programme to compensate for this, but we were never really comfortable with that, and we feel the shows suffered as a result.

So we’re going back to our roots – blurting out our rawest of raw opinions as soon as possible after first watching the episodes – and to do that, we need to switch to online pace, which is the pace at which almost all our regulars watched Series XI. This is not without its problems, and we apologise to the handful of you who are going to miss out as a result. But hopefully this will serve the majority much better than last year’s awkward compromise. By Friday evening, everyone should have had time to watch the week’s episode, but not so much time that it’s already been analysed from all possible angles.

Reviews: Our in-depth written reviews will return much as they were for Series XI; at UKTV Play pace, and posted a few days after each episode.

Let’s Talk About X (On Dave): There’ll definitely be a post for Cured on the Thursday it airs, but we’ll be honest – we’re really not sure how much demand there is for a second discussion thread. Plus, as we don’t yet know whether UKTV Play will have the next episode before or after the previous one airs on Dave, we’re not even sure if there’ll be space for it. We’ll play it by ear.

All of which means that there’ll be no Talking Points articles this year – they were only ever designed as a stop-gap to replace the Instant Reactions DwarfCasts, to provide something a bit more in-depth while waiting for the review. Now that the DwarfCasts are back to fulfilling their original purpose, there’s no need for Talking Points, and also they were slightly harder to write than we first anticipated.

After much rabbiting on, we hope you’ll be happy with the new way of doing things. We do, of course, remain flexible on all of this – not least because the timing of the UKTV Play release is such a wildcard – and nothing is set in stone, so do let us know if you have any feedback. Here we go again…

52 Responses to G&Tweaks

Would it be a good idea to tweak the original Let’s Talk About thread after each Dave broadcast, change the spoiler tags, and add a specific “welcome to Dave viewers” bookmark post when it happens? Maybe add a “(NOW OPEN TO DAVE VIEWERS)” to the title?

Glad you’re going at UKTV pace. If I was to make one minor comment it would be that I’d prefer the Dwarfcast to be after the broadcast episode at 9.40, eg, Timewaves’s Dwarfcast would go out directly after The One Where Everyones Kryten’s broadcast. Just feels like it could be more of an event that way, tying it in with a broadcast. Much better system than last year though.

If I was to make one minor comment it would be that I’d prefer the Dwarfcast to be after the broadcast episode at 9.40, eg, Timewaves’s Dwarfcast would go out directly after The One Where Everyones Kryten’s broadcast. Just feels like it could be more of an event that way, tying it in with a broadcast.

The snag with that is that we don’t know when the episodes will go on UKTV Play. If they go up on Thursday mornings, that might work (although I’d be concerned that not everyone will have had time to watch it by then), but if they don’t go up until after the Dave broadcast, it’d be really hard to squeeze in to the Thursday night.

If I was to make one minor comment it would be that I’d prefer the Dwarfcast to be after the broadcast episode at 9.40, eg, Timewaves’s Dwarfcast would go out directly after The One Where Everyones Kryten’s broadcast. Just feels like it could be more of an event that way, tying it in with a broadcast.

The snag with that is that we don’t know when the episodes will go on UKTV Play. If they go up on Thursday mornings, that might work (although I’d be concerned that not everyone will have had time to watch it by then), but if they don’t go up until after the Dave broadcast, it’d be really hard to squeeze in to the Thursday night.

Taskmaster episodes are currently going up on Wednesday mornings, except for this week’s which either went up late on Wednesday night or early on Thursday morning. So it may be reasonable to assume that they intend to upload RD on Thursday mornings provided they can avoid fucking it up.

Agree with the changes to not wait a week but Friday nights over Thursdays will almost never work for me which I’m gutted about as this will mean not being able to participate in the Dwarfcasts 😞 Can imagine this could be the case for others also? Would it not be possible to do them Thursday nights for proper instant reaction if the episodes are indeed released online Thursday mornings? Still I appreciate there really is no way to keep everyone happy with the UKTV Play thing! 🙈

Agree with the changes to not wait a week but Friday nights over Thursdays will almost never work for me which I’m gutted about as this will mean not being able to participate in the Dwarfcasts 😞 Can imagine this could be the case for others also? Would it not be possible to do them Thursday nights for proper instant reaction if the episodes are indeed released online Thursday mornings? Still I appreciate there really is no way to keep everyone happy with the UKTV Play thing! 🙈

We will certainly play it by ear, but it really does all depend on when the episodes are released on UKTV Play. An additional factor, however, is that Friday nights are much better for the five of us, not least because I’m going to be working til 10pm on the first four Thursdays.

We will certainly play it by ear, but it really does all depend on when the episodes are released on UKTV Play. An additional factor, however, is that Friday nights are much better for the five of us, not least because I’m going to be working til 10pm on the first four Thursdays.

Cheers Ian, and yes obviously the main thing is that you guys will actually be available to do the Dwarfcasts! 😂

Onto the topic of reorganisation, does the top bar need the black space?

And I know this is possibly a contentious point – but given the recent SarahWho ‘retard’ discussion, I thought it might possibly be worth pointing out – as someone with OCD, who has experienced the irrational thought-induced anxiety it brings, to the extent of attempted suicide, is ‘OCD-troubling’ the absolute best way it could have been phrased?

in a world where uktv play comes before dave and doesnt say when and reserves the right not to, cus they will probably drop them at different times again as it generates talk doing that and they use that to keep people discuss it to promo people into watching the next tv broadcast etc, … i think Friday is a good choice to give just enough time for everyone who watches online a chance to catch it having arrived. I work till 10pm still so will catch the casts when done, to start my weekend chill, except i might get one Friday im off and I’ll tune in live to that one.

Not to diminish or discount your experience, but I’m also crippled by clinical OCD and I thought it was a reasonable way of phrasing what he meant. Not sneery or demeaning at all to me.

Oh I know, it’s one of these things where it’s never meant in a bad way, but it’s so often misused that it’s actually very difficult to say you have it without people thinking it means you’re just a bit anally retentive (and thus not be treated remotely seriously), so I do try and spread awareness and ask people to maybe consider using a more accurate term. If everybody was as gracious about it as Ian there (thank you! <3) then the term would rarely be misused and a lot of people would feel more comfortable talking about their issues publicly.

Here is an observation about the recording orders of XI & XII I could not find anywhere else to put:

The broadcast order of XI was the exact reverse of the recording order, except for Give & Take being recorded first and airing third.
The broadcast order of XII is exactly the same as recording order, except for Cured being recorded third and airing first.